June 21, 2013 -- IS Network, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with Luke Cooper's permission -- In reply to Paul Le Blanc’s reply,
the first thing to say is “I agree”. These are questions that
revolutionaries in all countries should be debating out in a common
heterodox tendency. This is a point he made well in his original Dangerous Ideas talk,
when he said, "Should there be competing revolutionary socialist groups
or is the merger of the different revolutionary groups preferable?"

How to achieve left unity is a complex question in one country. It
becomes all the more challenging when posed internationally. But one can
see from the visits that Paul has made this year alone, and the
discussions and debates these are promoting across borders about the
future of the radical left, that there is growing transnational
engagement among diverse groups which reflects new possibilities (for
example, see his valuable recent talk in Australia here and read about the important changes taking place on the Antipodean revolutionary left here).

In this context, Paul is absolutely right to lay stress on being
concrete about differences, taking care to place emphasis on common
ground in order to try to work through the intellectual and political
challenges that we face. I certainly did not mean to choose an
unconstructive path; the one, as he points out, so typical of exchanges on the radical left and not "the one less travelled by"
in the words of the poet Robert Frost.

My motivation was to bring to
light what Paul had left implicit in his talk. He contextualised the
Stein remarks to respond to unspecified critics of them, before
proceeding to engage positively with Beyond Capitalism?For
those who had not read our book – i.e. the great majority of people! – I
thought it would be useful to point out that we, via Alan Wald, are
some of those critics and explain why we think these remarks need to be
subjected to critique. I had initially only intended to note this
briefly and actually planned to focus the reply on a different line of
argument. Namely, regardless of whether we think that we need a "Leninism 2.0" (the title of the meeting Paul did with Clare Solomon at Dangerous Ideas) can we, nonetheless, coming from different perspectives to a degree, reach substantive agreement on how revolutionaries
should organise?

As I sat down to write my interest in the question of
the US SWP grew and, knowing that Paul was likely to take the time
to reply, I thought I would leave that to the "reply to Paul’s reply" –
a decision that I now naturally regret. This is particularly
embarrassing for me given the generosity of Paul’s engagement with our book. In any case, this time round I do want to try to focus on this point – how to build a heterodox socialist tendency – so will just address a few things.

Paul writes at one point, "I am not inclined to insist that some
pattern from past revolutions must define the specifics of what we do in
the very different world of tomorrow." I agree with this and in my own
research, which takes a rather critical perspective on the origins and
nature of the Chinese Revolution, I go to great lengths to try and
understand it in its historical specificity and context.[1]
This is not the place to state my conclusions except to say that there
could be few more authoritarian communist parties than the one led by
Mao (who enjoyed a cult of personality Stalin would be envious of by at
least 1942, i.e. seven years prior to the revolution). Despite this,
even the CCP was dependent on a coalition to seize power. After
a series of military reverses in 1946, Mao was still speaking of a "long and hard struggle" of a decade or more. It was only the
catastrophe of quite inept Kuomintang rule that led the urban classes to
abandon them.[2]

This experience does not prove a great deal except to show that Paul is
right that all revolutions involve a coalition of "one sort or
another". In the Russian case, he is also right that "there would not
have been an insurrection without the Bolsheviks". The same can equally
be said, perhaps in more categorical terms, in the case of China’s
rupture: no communist party, no revolutionary insurrection. Full stop.
More pessimistically, in both cases there was a power vacuum in
societies experiencing an extreme state of social disintegration. This
creates a troubling connection between extreme poverty and decay and
revolutionary insurrection that I won’t go into, but that the left
arguably reflects insufficiently on.

None of us would look to the Chinese Revolution to exemplify the type
of revolutionary change we want to see. The Bolshevik Revolution was
different because it brought into being a commune state in which power
passed to the soviets. It involved genuine political plurality for the
subaltern classes, and not merely compromises made by an authoritarian
party bent on a one-party state that we find in the Chinese case.[3]
This multi-party element did not survive 1918 and was formally annulled
in 1921. Importantly, these turns were not simply justified on the
basis of pure exigencies, but were indeed done so philosophically. This
prompted Rosa Luxemburg’s intervention shortly before she died that I
highlighted in my original post. As someone concerned to show
sensitivity to historically specific circumstances, I am sympathetic to
Paul when he writes:

The problem is not for us to “get
right” some timeless organizational logic or ethics that certain
comrades of past days violated. The problem cannot best be grasped in
terms of philosophy, but rather in terms of history and sociology.

While sympathetic, the problem I see with this is that social revolutions do
confront universal problems. If subaltern classes seize power intent on
carrying through a transition to a socialist mode of production they
will expropriate the capitalist and landed classes and de facto fuse
power into a single state. As we all know, this entails all kinds of
opportunities for bureaucratic authoritarianism. If a "monopolist"
philosophy is underpinning the practice of the party that led the
successful insurrection – rather than, say, a pluralist and
participatory political philosophy – it seems legitimate to say the
revolution is less protected from despotism than it might
otherwise be. Paul argues correctly that Stein and the US SWP
supported multi-party soviet democracy and makes reference to the Transitional Programme. But I anticipated this argument in my original reply (although my literary point of reference was Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed):

A quite justified defence of Stein’s
remarks at this stage would argue that this is precisely what he stood
for: a genuine working class democracy in the spirit of Trotsky’s
programme famously outlined in The Revolution Betrayed. The detour into the Russian events might therefore reasonably be seen as a non sequitur.
Yet it is not quite as simple as all that. For the problem lies in the
way in which the single-mindedness of the mission… can feed into a deep
desire to subordinate the movement to the party. Only the party can
realise the mission. All other parties threaten the mission. All other
parties must be "destroyed".

I am sorry that Paul feels that I ignored his contextualisation of
Stein’s comments and focused on explaining why I felt they were neither
credible in the US context nor desirable as a general approach to
socialist politics. Nowhere did I deny that there was a highly
class-conscious advanced section of the class, but, on the contrary, I
noted the significant support the farmer-labour movement enjoyed.
Admittedly, I did not engage with other aspects of Stein’s argument in
his 1944 speech that Paul highlighted in his talk, but I’m not sure my
argument hinges on this. My point is, and remains, that regardless of
the many good positions Stein no doubt advanced and his contribution, he
was wrong to argue that revolutionary parties should be "monopolists in
the sphere of politics". Paul’s reformulation of the Cannon and Stein
positions in terms of intransigent struggle against Stalinism and social
democracy by a determined force, the US Socialist Workers Party,
attempts to render these remarks benign. My concern, however, remains
that this plays down the need for political plurality within a
revolutionary party of the ant-Stalinist left. Even if one does not
accept this as a universal principle in the manner that I tend to argue,
then to simply consider the complexities that the post-war epoch posed
to the followers of Leon Trotsky surely illustrates the utility of
encouraging a significant degree of ‘free thinking’.

This brings me on to the final "reply" point in reference to
finishing the article with the Alan Wald quote. For the sake of clarity I
will just summarise what I think can be usefully extrapolated from
Wald’s argument on the role of "historical Trotskyism" in the
development of a contemporary revolutionary politics. What I find
valuable about Wald’s analysis
is that it introduces an important element of relativity and
experimentation in how we build stronger revolutionary organisations. It
openly breaks with the conception of intransigent struggle against "wrong programmes" in favour of "the right programme" in the mass
movement, and instead emphasises that we need to be "anti-monopolist in
the field of politics, learning from and defending the rights of
political rivals". It also does not repudiate the entire Trotskyist
tradition, rejecting vulgar anti-Trotskyism and allowing us to integrate
the insights of this tradition into a modern revolutionary politics
that is multi-faceted, taking from a plurality of traditions. I would
imagine, judging by the discussions we have had, that Paul agrees with
much of this, which is why I said in the article I was merely "challenging his attempt to interpret the Stein comments along the lines
that would make it compatible with a plural" approach to political
organisation.

What is to be done?

The conclusion of Paul’s article starts to bring to light the common
ground. I had raised a series of questions about the differences that
should be containable within a heterodox revolutionary current
determined not to let differences lead to splits. I gave the examples of
whether we identify as a "Leninist" tendency, how we analyse the
experience of twentieth century Stalinism, and the changes taking place
in the working class internationally as the global division of labour
evolves. Paul argues, correctly in my view, that building political
organisations that are able to work effectively as a democratic
collective, play a role in the struggles of subaltern classes, and
convince millions they have the power to get rid of capitalism is the
critical framework through which left unity must be judged.

I did not choose these questions accidentally, but with an eye to the recent debate and split in the British Socialist
Workers Party, out of which the International Socialist Network
emerged. These are all questions that the "IS Tradition Mark II" (i.e.
post-1968/1978) came to answer rather emphatically with "one voice".
There was a single conception of Leninism that emphasised the role of
an, arguably, substitutionist party machine (this was challenged in its
crisis, both by the radical opposition and, more recently, albeit in more abstract terms, by longstanding member Ian Birchall).
There was a tradition in political economy, state-capitalism, around
which the party came to be defined – an outlook, due to its modalities,
that undoubtedly helped it through the 1990s but, insofar as it
continued to define the tendency, was arguably anachronistic by
the 2000s.

Even on the question that Paul argues it is "inevitable" to
have differences on – how to understand the changes in the working class
under neoliberalism – the SWP have tended to adopt a de facto ‘line’.[4] Regardless of how one views the different positions taken by, for example, David Harvey or Kevin Doogan,
it is remarkable that the SWP appears to have had no advocates of the
Harvey position – he is, after all, one of the radical left’s most
popular scholars and activist-intellectuals.

In short, the largest
tendency on the revolutionary left came to be defined politically in extremely narrow terms. Is
it unfair to conclude, as I tend to, that there is a relationship
between its lack of ideological plurality and the lack of democratic
accountability that was evident during its recent crisis? Narrowness
feeds into excessive centralism. Excessive centralism feeds into
narrowness. This, as Paul has argued, was not a feature of Lenin’s pre-1917 party, but has become a persistent aspect of the post-war radical left.

My point that embracing a greater degree of political plurality opens
up the possibility of less ‘caution’ in our approach to revolutionary
unity was meant as a simple one: once we free ourselves of the idea that
an effective political organisation has to be so ideologically narrow,
then it opens up avenues for revolutionary unity that we would not have
previously imagined possible.

Regardless of what theoretical tradition we choose to inform our
approach to revolutionary organisation today, it might be possible to
agree on the following:

The starting point for the formulation of an effective policy should
be discussion among as many of the membership as is conceivably
possible in the circumstances we are facing (taking into account
conditions of legality, and so on). A membership that is involved in the
active formulation of the policy will be more inclined to implement it
energetically. Creative experiments in "referendum" of the type
practiced by the autonomist IOPS might be used, so long as they do not encourage the development of an atomised membership of passive individuals.

An effective organisation should aspire to unity in action around
collectively agreed points. But sometimes that unity in action might not
be possible. Rather than splitting and forming a different organisation
to operate a line free of the constraints of central discipline, it is
surely better to allow both currents to put their position to the test
of practice yet still remain in a common organisation. Discipline, in
this sense, would be voluntary, rather than coercive – a view more
complementary to the cultural ethos of the twenty-first century that Paul Mason has emphasised.

Bureaucracies are necessary evils of the modern world. Professional
administration, effective communication and the organisation of
participatory democracy all become harder without central organisation
in any form. The danger that arises lies in how material interests
become invested in a position within the central organisation. For the
radical left the awards are not monetary but nonetheless confer
privileges; a less alienated, more self-directed and intellectual form
of work and a position of authority and power over the membership as a
whole. If a bureaucracy feels itself under attack then tribalism can
result, compounding the disparity in power relations between the lay
members and the centre. The measures that might be taken to overcome
these dangers foreshadow the type of anti-bureaucratic policies that
would be needed in a working class state, such as regular competitive
elections for office-holders and/or a policy of rotation in position.
But there is also a cultural question of encouraging members to take on
responsibilities for the group’s work and thus avoiding the substitution
of the membership by the apparatus.

Freedom to dissent can be tackled culturally as well as
procedurally. A heterodox tendency will encourage difference and
free thinking, creating a culture of challenging debate and argument. The
freedom to form opposition groupings ("factions") should be total, even
if the danger of drawing permanent fixed lines of disagreement is
recognised.

An active orientation to the working class has to involve – as Paul has emphasised
in relation to the post-Occupy conjuncture – trying to build durable
organisations in the class that are not subject to the passive
bureaucratism of the reformist labour movement. The British left in
particular is prone to a "cult of the next big thing",
which tends to eschew the long-term orientation necessary for the left
to accumulate trust and authority in working class. This is particularly
important to recreate a sense of community that has been undermined,
but not entirely eroded, by the cultural impact of neoliberalism on mass
social consciousness (a point emphasised by Richard Seymour in his speech to Crisis and Unity).

I agree with Paul that an active orientation to class struggle is critical for any radical left-wing project. Dan Swain
remarks in response to Paul’s speech that socialists need to gain
practical-knowledge through this orientation, which forms part of the "most advanced ideas" in society. This also echoes, albeit in more
Leninist terms, the plea of Tom Walker
for more "learning" and less "lecturing" on the left.

Agreeing entirely
with these viewpoints, my concern only arises if practical
collaboration in the working class becomes counterposed to socialist
unity. The idea that there can be no revolutionary party without a
radical vanguard within the working class, true as it is, can potentially be
drawn upon to justify passivity towards the question of revolutionary
unity today.

Counterfire, for example – the group that organised the
Dangerous Ideas event – are not in favour of pursuing left regroupment
in Britain and counterpose to this joint work in forums such as the
People’s Assembly. "Build the struggles today and socialist unity will
come in the future as a spontaneous result of it", goes the argument. I
am still Leninist enough to emphasise the need for active initiative for unity. Hence, my concern that Paul’s remarks – particularly when seen in the context of speaking at the Counterfire event – could be seen as overly cautious.

This, I hope, puts a little more flesh on the bone on a remark in our book that Paul highlighted in his speech,
“the need to regroup the left in new political formations that provide a
space for strategic thinking, that allow different strategies to
co-exist in a certain tension, while also creating the conditions for
unity and action”. There is, I am sure, much more flesh still to come.

Notes

[1]
I am no expert on the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions, so I hope Paul
forgives me for trying to elaborate on my point through the Chinese
case.

[2]
The alliance with the middle class nationalist intelligentsia was
buoyed by the patriotic favour created by the Korean War, sustained into
the First Five Year Plan, but fatally broken in the post Hundred
Flowers Campaign repression (1956).

[3]Formally speaking a
pseudo-multi-party system existed and was enshrined in the People’s
Political Consultative Conference that agreed the popular frontist "Common Programme" of 1949. But in practice political and economic power
was effectively centralised into the hands of the CCP. This footnote is
for the sake of clarity – I can’t imagine my remarks on this are
controversial.

[4]
This "line" has been particularly characterised by the use of sweeping
straw man arguments against their opponents: “There is a myth that
changes in capitalism have made workers virtually powerless. Many
commentators and academics suggest that permanent jobs are a thing of
the past and that everyone now faces a world of constant turbulence,
transient work and rootless employment. If the great majority of us are
permanently insecure at work, the balance of power has swung massively
towards the employers.” Kimber, C. "Precarious Reflections",
International Socialism Journal no. 123, June 25, 2009.